In
preparation for re-evaluating my hearing deficit several inches of paperwork
arrived Saturday by mail. In an effort
to conserve paper, both sides of the pages were used so that I might have twice
as much to read through before preparing and writing my responses.
The VA wants
to be told what particular incident is linked to my hearing degradation. That’s not an easy thing to answer. The more deeply I delve into it, the more
incidents spring into memory.
War is a
noisy business and the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps took a
second place to no one during the VietNam War.
Looking backward, the potential single incidents are numerous.
Basic
Training, BCT, shrill whistles at 0500, screaming Drill Sergeants bellowing
into recruits’ ears at a distance of centimeters. Factor in two weeks of “train fire,” DI’s had
ear protection, of sorts. The troops
didn’t. Long days filled with the noise
of 7.62 NATO rounds were of some concern, as was the single day spent throwing
grenades. (ignore the soon to be disciplined sergeant who spent much of that
day terrorizing the recruits by walking around with a grenade in his hand and
the safety pin for that small bomb in his pocket – he was a VietNam veteran and
moderately unstable according to the other DI’s)
Don’t forget
the nighttime infiltration crawl through a sand pit about 100 meters in length
with apron and concertina barbed wire overhead and all around. That was made damaging to hearing by
detonation pits filled with artillery simulators and by the continual
stuttering of M-60 machine guns locked into mounts that kept the rounds coming
downrange, snapping overhead, at about 3 feet above the ground.
There was the
21-hour flight from here to there. 200
or so troops in the back end of a C-141, ear protection for the aircrew, none
for the troops.
There was the
idiot standing next to me when we were driven out to the Quon Loi perimeter to
battle sight our M-16s. He opened fire
without permission, the muzzle of his rifle about a foot from my ear. The warning about the danger of standing too
close to the muzzle of an M-16 was certainly justified. My ears still haven’t quit ringing. Call it tinnitus if you will, it is a
lifelong distraction.
Add up the
detonations of thousands of small arms rounds, hundreds of mortar bombs and 122
mm rockets close enough to rattle ones teeth.
Stir in the screaming of jet engines, the thumping, popping rotor blades
of helicopters, 105 mm and 8 Inch outgoing artillery rounds, sapper’s satchel
charges, claymores, pop flares trip flares grenades, and fu gas. It was a noisy time.
Other than
the first M-16 event, I can’t pin any single event to any quantity of hearing
degradation. My hearing was good enough
to be a musician and then it gradually wasn’t.
Now it isn’t.
Three copies.
No corrections springs to mind because of the paperwork packet I received. The
Army wanted 3 – 6 copies of everything. There
were multiple page forms that contained 3 pages and two carbons so that one
pass through a typewriter could churn out the desired 3 copies. The first page’s legibility depended upon the
machine’s ribbon. The second, upon the strength
of the typist’s hands. The third copy
required imagination and a serious will to get along with the clerk- typists
who were chained to desks pushing out multiple copies of every document that
helped the armed forces move men, women, supplies, and paperwork around the
world. The insistence upon no errors
could, and did, turn a five-minute form into a three-hour herculean labor.
Oh,
yeah! Don’t sign that with blue ink or
we start all over again.
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